Last year, I pre-ordered two debut poetry collections: The Sobbing School by fellow Marshall Scholar Joshua Bennett and The Knowledge Weapon by the winner of Bare Fiction’s Debut Poetry Collection Competition, Annette C. Boehm. I was desperate to read these collections so I ordered them the first chance I got. Then I waited, full of the…
Category: Poetry
Finnish Poetry
I am writing this post from a warm and colourful studio in Central Finland, sipping tea and eating pumpkin seed bread. This week, on behalf of Cardiff University, I am visiting the University of Jyväskylä to observe seminars, give presentations, teach workshops and learn more about creative writing in Finland. It has been extraordinary so far…
Semi-Detached
My last post was in May and a lot has happened since then. Summer is my busiest season and as work for my day job, PhD and freelance projects increased my blog posts and personal writing took a reluctant back seat. Luckily, things are cooling down, both literally and figuratively, and I can now take…
Grieve, Read, Write
My Dad would have been 48 this Boxing Day. I wished him a happy birthday three years ago, chatting casually about the ham he was cooking, what he and my grandmother did for Christmas, what his plans were for New Year’s Eve. He seemed happy. He’d finally won a disability settlement he’d been after for…
Written Portraits
October is coming which means warm scarves, woolly jumpers, colourful leaves and Made in Roath are just around the corner! Although we’ve got an excellent poetry and literature programme planned, I am most excited to be organising another Written Portraits event for the upcoming festival. Run for this first time at Solstice in June, this…
Dignity
Not many of us think about our dignity on a daily basis. In fact, I’m not sure I’d truly considered what mine meant before being invited to develop two creative writing sessions on the topic for a project run by Making Minds and Interlink. Before planning these workshops, which were aimed at people dealing with…
Roath Writers Anthology Launch at RARA
Three years is not long in the scheme of things and yet there is something significant about it. When I started Roath Writers three years ago I could not see beyond the first session, could not imagine people coming again and again – the early mornings picking poetry, the late nights at the pub. I…
Loss and Poetry
Since my father’s death in 2013, I’ve learned a lot about grief and writing. I’ve spent late nights reading poetry books and memoirs and early mornings combing over blogs, essays, and academic journals. I have led Death Writing workshops, given a grief talk at Ignite Cardiff, and even changed my PhD topic to better understand…
Places to Inspire Writing in Cardiff
Originally posted on Welsh Writers’ Trust:
All writers have experienced that dearth of inspiration; the time when we scrabble through articles in newspapers, sift through old diaries and scour every object that surrounds us to find something, anything, that might spark some much craved creativity. In those trying times when nothing seems to mean anything…
Solstice Festival
After freelancing seven days a week from September to May, I look forward to taking back my weekends each summer. For me these days mean lots of tea, new poetry collections, and as much writing as I can manage. Often, I also squeeze in a few walks, documentaries and drinks with friends. They allow me…
Christina Thatcher 